The Watchmen cad-3

by Brian Freemantle

“What did you get?” asked Danilov, impatient at the relief-in-the-front-line camaraderie.

  “A fly farts in that place, we hear it,” promised Harrison. “And a lot more besides …. Hey, we made a great team, the three of us. We should all be in movies-the new Marx Brothers.” He erupted into laughter at his own joke, prodding Danilov. “Get it, you being a Russian. Marx Brothers, like …?”

  “I got it,” Danilov said soberly. “It’s very good: very funny.”

  Pamela argued essential continuity to have Paul Lambert lead the forensic team, which was enlarged by the inclusion of a D.C. police pathologist, a bald doctor who only just tiptoed beyond being a dwarf and seemed prepared to confront anyone. He had, fortunately, brought nose clips, which everyone was now wearing: having come close to losing her lunch-as well as her credibility in front of men waiting for her to throw up-Pamela would have marked her cross on a ballot paper to elect the man president. The pathologist scarcely had to bend to remove the bullet-split pillow that had been put over Roanne Harding’s face. There were two bullet wounds, one in the center of the forehead, a second that had destroyed her left eye. Both sockets were maggot filled.

  Lambert surveyed the room and said, “I’m not happy with this.”

  “I shouldn’t think Roanne Harding is, either,” said Pamela. “What’s your point?”

  “What do you see?” demanded the scientific examiner.

  “Dead woman, maybe sexually violated. Apartment turned over, searching for something ….” She paused. “There is something,” she said.

  Lambert called to one of his team, “What’s the count?”

  “One,” the fingerprint expert called back. “Hers, I’d guess. No way of getting anything from her, decomposed like that. But her prints are on the personnel file we got from the Pentagon.”

  The boyish forensic head raised a warning finger at the approach of the police surgeon and said to the man, “How’s it look to you?”

  “Intrusion,” said the pathologist at once. “Guy breaks in to an apartment he thinks is unoccupied, starts to toss it. Girl wakes up, naked. He takes the diversion, rapes her, shoots her through that pillow to deaden the sound. Zips his fly, takes what else he wants. Goes home to watch the Letterman show. I’d have said it was all in a night’s work.”

  “Except for what?” pressed Lambert.

  “For you guys being here. This should be PD, not bureau. She the girl from the Washington Monument you guys been looking for?”

  Pamela didn’t answer. Instead, waving her arm around the destroyed room, she said to Lambert, “This is neat, isn’t it! Tidy trashing?”

  Lambert smiled broadly. “Right! It’s my job to go through tossed rooms. This stuff has been put down.”

  Pamela said, “Might help if the Watchmen thought we’d bought it.”

  “Give us a little time, at least,” agreed Lambert.

  She said, “I’ll get the director to talk personally with Commissioner Frost. Have it released as a homicide not connected with us. The surrounding apartments were cleared because the danger was a gas explosion. No one was identifiably Bureau.”

  Pamela was aware of Lambert shifting beside her and the doctor looking at her questioningly. She said, “Let’s give it a try, at least!”

  The doctor shrugged. “All I’m responsible for are the medical findings.”

  “Which are?” pressed Pamela.

  “Decomposition has stages,” said the man. “From the maggot samples I’ve taken, forensic entomologists will be able to date the death to within a day or two. I’ve taken vaginal samples but there won’t be any semen left, for DNA. No fingernail debris, either: There aren’t any finger ends.”

  “We got a long way to go,” said Lambert, exasperated.

  “We always did,” said Pamela. She hoped Lambert would spread the word on how she’d recognized the intended deception.

  Jack Harrison most definitely had turned 69 Bay View Avenue, Brooklyn, into a sound box. And just as definitely got a lot more besides. Arnie Orlenko had married Mary in a drive-through ceremony in Las Vegas eighteen months earlier-cajoling from her the actual, traceable month, May, by telling her that he’d arranged his divorce on the anniversary of his wedding to his first wife-and that she and Arnie had been in Chicago for the previous two weeks, seeing import-export business friends of Arnie’s. She hadn’t liked Chicago, her first visit: The wind was too cold, coming off the lake, even in summer. She didn’t like where they lived in Brooklyn for the same reason. They’d move, maybe. Arnie was always talking deals, about moving on. If they did move, she hoped it wouldn’t be to Chicago.

  “And she slipped me her number!” declared the ebullient FBI technician. “As if I didn’t have it already.”

  “Let’s test,” suggested Cowley, pressing the replay button for what had been recorded during their return journey from Brooklyn.

  “Brooklyn’s out, for fuck’s sake! What are you worrying about?” Mary’s voice.

  “The day we get back?” Orlenko.

  “What’s that got to do with it?”

  “That’s what I mean.”

  “I know cops. Can smell cops. They were dumb-assed electricians probably jerking off right now from the memory of the titty show I gave them.”

  “What did you tell that guy you were with most of the time?”

  “Small talk. Nothing! But if they had been cops, you’d have rung bells with your tight-assed number.”

  “Show me exactly where he went! What he did.”

  “He fixed the things that broke, for fuck’s sake. Put funny things on wires and stuff, made needles jump.” There was the sound of movement, people walking. “Now what the fuck are you doing!”

  “Looking.”

  “For what?”

  “Won’t find it!” intruded Jack Harrison.

  “I don’t know.” Orlenko.

  “That’s why he won’t find it,” said Harrison, talking to the ceiling.

  The noise of scratching and squeaking, as screws were unscrewed, came loudly into the Manhattan office.

  “So!” demanded the woman.

  “Looks all right.”

  “The fucking trucks are still driving up and down the street, for Christ’s sake! You seen too many movies.”

  “What’s the time?”

  “Ten after four.”

  “I’m going to nap before we go out.”

  “You wanna fuck? Fool around a little?”

  “I wanna nap.”

  “Just offering value for money,” she said.

  “Jesus! The waste!” Harrison moaned.

  “Las Vegas found the registration,” said Cowley. “Mary’s full name is Mary Jo James. Born in Montana. Orlenko is Arseni Yanovich Orlenko, born-wait for it-in Gorki, June 10, 1958. Job description on the marriage certificate is engineer. Got a match for Mary Jo from a forefinger print on one of the in-flight magazines from the flight. She’s got three convictions for prostitution, two for the larceny of her Johns’ wallets. Served three months in a correctional institute in Billings five years ago. Nothing recorded since then.”

  “Time I called Moscow,” said Danilov.

  Pavin reminded him that the fingerprint comparison had to be made mechanically and visually, against a named offender, because none of their records was computerized. Having Orlenko’s full name might help, but nothing had shown against any of the Orlenko’s so far checked.

  The positive connection came from elsewhere. The Gorki number from which two calls had been made to 69 Bay View Avenue and to which one had been returned was a garage rented by Viktor Nikolaevich Nikov. The Moscow number to which the two other outgoing international calls had been made from Bay View Avenue was to a newly opened restaurant named the Golden Hussar on Pereulok Vorotnikovskij, off the inner ring road. There was no intelligence of its having been adopted by any known organized crime brigade.

  “We’ve got our link!” Cowley exclaimed in quiet triumph.

  “A link,” cautioned Danilov. �
��Leading where?”

  “To as far as it goes,” said the American.

  The sound of renewed movement started in the Bay View clapboard at 5:20 P.M. Orlenko woke up irritable, complained Mary Jo should have called him earlier, and insisted he wasn’t taking the car, even though it was a long way to walk.

  “Easier to see if we’re followed, going on foot.”

  “For Christ’s sake, how long we going to go on with this shit!”

  “Until I say so.”

  “Can we go to the Odessa after you get your call? I like the blinis there. And I’m hungry.”

  “Maybe.”

  Forewarned, Cowley alerted the surveillance van and the agents in the four backup vehicles against any pursuit on foot. Working from the exhibit board map, he moved one car close to the junction with West 37 and Neptune and put another nearer to the Coney Island strip, at the join with Atlantic Avenue. Both vehicles, in constant radio contact with each other as well as with Manhattan, were able to see Orlenko’s constant turning, to check for followers.

  The observer in the Atlantic Avenue car said, “From the look of things, Mary Jo’s giving him hell for making her walk.”

  There were so many people along Surf Avenue and Riegelmann Boardwalk that there was no risk of Orlenko identifying any pursuit. There was still thirty minutes left of happy hour in the bar that Orlenko headed for so obviously that two agents from the Atlantic Avenue car, now on foot, were able to get in ahead of the Russian. The third man alerted the field teams to the location of the targets, so the surveillance could be rotated, which was an unfortunate professional precaution because it was a topless bar called Bare Necessities.

  Orlenko drank beer, Mary Jo vodka martinis, straight up with a twist. They didn’t talk a lot. At precisely 6:25 he left her alone at a table by the stage on which a disinterested girl with a G-string and unmoving, rock-solid breasts was gyrating to “Simply the Best” and walked to the pay phone booth. He went in but didn’t attempt a call. At precisely 6:30 the telephone rang. The observers later reported that he appeared to listen more than he talked. The conversation lasted two minutes and thirty-five seconds. Orlenko didn’t bother to sit when he returned to their table but stood, waiting for his wife to finish her martini. He left his beer unfinished.

  In the Manhattan office Cowley said, “It’s a pattern. But of what?”

  As he spoke the fax machine began relaying what turned out to be the corporate record material on the Trenton, New Jersey, company that owned 69 Bay View Avenue.

  “Here’s more to go with it,” said an agent, taking the sheets as they came off the machine. “Two of the listed directors have got Russian-sounding names.”

  Anne Stovey decided to give it one more day before approaching Washington again. They’d probably laughed at her like everyone else. Foul-mouthed her, perhaps, for wasting their time. So what? She’d responded to an all-stations request and she deserved a reply, even if it was to go to hell and stop bothering them. Another written message or a phone call? No hurry. She had twenty-four hours to make up her mind.

  21

  In the bedroom closet Pamela Darnley discovered the green backpack with yellow buckles in which Lambert was later to isolate Semtex traces. It was when she was using the apartment telephone to obtain its billing records that she found the cassette had been removed from the answering machine. In a locked bureau drawer that one of Lambert’s technicians easily opened with a pick lock there was a series of photographs showing a child that could have been Roanne Harding in the arms of a man-quickly identified by the Roanoke team as her father, Albert Johnson Harding. It was posed in front of what appeared to be a shrine to Malcolm X. In two the child, whom Pamela guessed to have been no more than four, was aping her smiling father’s clenched-first, Black Power salute.

  Pamela used the apartment telephone for a second time to run the check on bureau records, from which Albert Johnson Harding emerged a civil rights activist in the early 1960s. So did a woman in the photographs, whose name on FBI files was Angela Jane Roland. There was no criminal history against either.

  There was no activist or criminal listing for the girl herself, under the name of Roanne Roland Harding or Joan Roland. She had lived in Lexington Place for only four months. Two of her immediate neighbors claimed not to have seen her at all since she’d moved in and the two others hardly ever. Roanne Harding had made no effort to be friendly-positively ignoring them when they had encountered her-and neither could remember her ever having visitors. The Realtor traced that first day admitted not having checked the woman’s tenancy references, from a credit rating agency and a law firm, both in Chicago and both, upon immediate check, proving to be forged. Roanne Harding had always paid her rent, in cash, on its due date and had given the required two months’ notice to terminate the tenancy three weeks earlier. There were no personal letters, credit card receipts, or bank statements anywhere in the apartment-or in her handbag found in the same closet as the backpack, with a discarded and empty wallet alongside as apparent evidence of robbery. The uncleared mailbox only contained advertising fliers and junk mail. There were no old newspapers, magazines, or any books. The clothes closet contained just two business suits and a dress, which had been left undisturbed in the phony ransacking. There were only three pairs of briefs and no bra, despite the girl being comparatively large busted. There was no computer or TV-nor obvious evidence of there having been either-in the apartment.

  William Cowley had just learned of Arseni Orlenko’s 6:30 P.M. public telephone conversation in the Bare Necessities when Pamela came on the line from the J. Edgar Hoover incident room.

  “Sounds like you’ve had a busy day, too,” he said after they’d exchanged accounts.

  “More productive for you than for me,” said Pamela. “Everything about Lexington Place is phony. She didn’t live there, not properly. It was like a hotel room. Nothing personal. The photographs were the only things.”

  “You think they were planted intentionally to be found?”

  “Could be,” accepted Pamela, wishing she’d offered the suggestion.

  “You’ve done well in a few hours,” praised Cowley. “Realizing the place hadn’t really been trashed but getting it logged as an unconnected homicide was brilliant.”

  “Like to know what was possibly on that answering machine tape.”

  “And I’d like to have heard Orlenko’s incoming call at the titty bar,” said Pamela. “We’ve put a tap on Roanne’s line and another tape in the machine, just in case there’s a call. I’ve got a field team in Roanoke, which is our only positive lead, although mother and father died two years ago within six months of each other. I’m on my way to the Pentagon to talk to her work supervisor.” She hesitated. “The bastards are still so far ahead they’re out of sight.”

  “There’s dust on the horizon,” said Cowley, gauging her depression.

  “I can’t see it,” said Pamela.

  The evening rush was easing by the time Pamela crossed the reopened Arlington Bridge to pick up the Pentagon feed road. Carl Ashton was waiting for her at the gate, as promised, and accepted without comment her insistence that she shouldn’t be introduced as bureau but as D.C. homicide.

  “Looks like we got our intruder after all,” said Ashton. The self-satisfaction was obvious after all the criticism.

  “I wish it told me more,” said Pamela. That’s what she needed, to deduce or find something that the director would recognize as taking the case substantially forward. “You sure we’ve got everything you had on her?”

  “You already asked me that,” reminded the security chief. “I checked, as I promised I would. You’ve got it all.”

  “You spoke to her supervisor?”

  Ashton shook his head. “Only told her Roanne’s been murdered. Her name’s Bella Atkins and she’s pissed being kept late.”

  “Doesn’t sound like she’s sad about it.”

  “Decide for yourself,” suggested the man.

  Bella At
kins was a commanding, severely dressed woman with heavy features and graying hair. She was very obviously unmoved at learning that someone she’d known, albeit slightly, had been killed. She didn’t ask how it had happened.

  “Shouldn’t have got past the entry qualification,” insisted the woman, as if it had some relevance. They were in Ashton’s office, overlooking one of the inner courtyards.

  “How did she?” asked Pamela. It was hardly a homicide detective’s question, but it didn’t seem to occur to the other woman.

  “You tell me,” said the supervisor indignantly, looking demandingly at the computer security chief. “She wasn’t right from the start. We’re working current Microsoft and she said she was only used to old systems, 3.1 stuff. So allowances were made when she first arrived. I had doubts by the end of the second week.”

  “You’re in the ordering division. Supplies, stationery, office equipment,” Pamela said. “Did she have access to other departments?”

  “Nowhere beyond her own room,” said the woman. “But she moved around that enough. I guessed she was asking for advice from other operators.”

  Instead of which she was busily attaching phony antistatic bands, Pamela thought. “You say she didn’t really know what she was doing, working a terminal?”

  “No, ma’am. She was hopeless. She hardly knew anything more than absolute basics: scarcely more than how to turn on and off, touch type-she was as slow as hell, needing to look at the keyboard all the time-and what a mouse was.”

  “Are we talking about the Pentagon?” demanded Pamela, looking in disbelief at Carl Ashton.

  “I filed a complaint at the end of those two weeks,” said the woman. “The process, against suit for wrongful dismissal, took another two and a half months. Would you believe she’d actually learned to type faster in that time!”

  “What about people she met here? Made friends with?”

  “She didn’t. Some of the other girls got to calling her “lonesome.” It was the same with guys, too. She was kinda pretty but as far as I know never agreed to date, not once. Never tried to share a table in the cafeteria or want to share hers with anybody else. Left promptly on time, catching the first staff bus into D.C.” Bella Atkins looked pointedly at her watch. “Even the last one’s gone now. Lucky I brought the car.”